Obsession, Obsessively Told: A Review of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

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What if… What if you were an anonymous urbanite, going about your daily routine in, say, London, when some indescribable airborne object falls through the nothingness and crash-lands on your head, forever altering your somethingness…

What if that happened, and then it’s months later. You’ve doubled back from the abyss and there you are, at home, relearning everything. Physically you’re fine, but there’s a gaping hole where your sense of connection used to be. A piece of the puzzle is missing and with it your own sense of reality. You wish you could piece together some sense of your previous self because only then, you think, you’d be complete. Occasionally you brush up against that reality – a scrap of paper, a passing word – something to tease you, to trigger the connection with your past, with your self.

And then the money. You learn that your bank balance has shot through the stratosphere, the result of a settlement from the perpetrators of your condition. And now, as they say, money is no object.

You think long and hard and you decide that the best use for your magical millions is to attempt to regain your reality – to rebuild, in every way, and by any means necessary, your vaguely-remembered life. This is the ultra-high concept of Tom McCarthy’s meticulously plotted and crafted Remainder.

A rational search through memory doesn’t work so our hero opts for the irrational. A memory shake-up. Everything in his past would have left a mark of some sort – some kind of footprint. So he sets out to trigger these marks randomly. Though consciously implementing a random search cancels out its randomness.

Eventually, he plots the few vague or triggered memories that he has and tries to rebuild his surroundings around them so that every step within this recreated environment would trigger his sense of whole. So he buys an apartment building that resembles the one in his memory, and then the surrounding buildings, alters them to match the half-remembered images in his mind. Then he auditions actors to populate his new/old world. These players would be there for him around the clock to repeatedly enact the triggered memories.

You’d think all of this would be implausible, but the rendering is so painstakingly detailed that every time you think, “but what about…?”, you find that McCarthy is one step ahead of you. He’s already worked out the logical leaps. And once you wrap your mind around the notion that money can buy any service, somehow the improbable becomes possible.

Our hero isn’t the most likable of heroes, and more than once I became frustrated with his obsessive, often cruel, perfectionism. But then I remember that every supporting character is on his payroll. Everyone – his long-suffering facilitators, his “actors” – they all knew what they were getting into, at first at least, and are handsomely compensated.

And just how perfect does his recreated environment need to be? Partial success is abject failure. The point for him is to capture the connection, not merely an acceptable re-enactment. And once captured, it must be repeated. Realness is a state, not an isolated action. To experience it, our narrator must return to it again and again. It is only in the constant repetition of a remembered action that he finds the connection that he seeks.

And until when? As the story progresses, you realize that our hero needs to do more than just re-enact his environment over and over again. He reaches a point in his obsession where he must merge with his action, slow down the motion and be one with his environment, with the increasingly hyper-real experiences that he’s manufacturing. Only then will he feel complete.

Along with memory gaps, words and concepts have disappeared from our narrator’s verbal toolbox. And so we also get a complete sense of narrative process. Like the Tourette’s-affected hero of Jonathan Lethem’sMotherless Brooklyn, we’re privy to the machinations and linguistic somersaults that our narrator goes through to make himself understood.

A story of obsession, then, obsessively told. A meticulously rendered tale of meticulousness itself. It’s hard not to feel simultaneously irritated at both the action and the narrator, and yet utterly compelled to see his obsession through.

Andrew Saikali
is a writer in Toronto, Canada, and passes his days as a copy editor with The Globe and Mail. He spends his moments of leisure listening to music, reading, watching films and prowling the streets of Toronto, and he feels that he is long-overdue for a vacation so that he can do more of those things. At any given time, he is probably pining for distant shores and really should do more traveling and less pining.

A man shaves off his mustache and, consequently, his life. A boy gets lost within his dilemmas and insecurities, echoing downfalls of a mature man. Where does Emmanuel Carrere want the reader to end up? I'm unsure, but you can read Class Trip & The Mustache for yourself and try to figure it out.Both stories are unforgiving, that is for sure. The reader faces two dilemmas (which I will attempt to convey in reverse order, having read The Mustache first). There is a man. He is convinced that he had a mustache for years. He jokes about shaving it off. And, in the first five pages of the short novel, he shaves off the mustache. And with it, his life - or what one can only presume to be his life.Next, the reader is entangled in a series of existentialist debates. Did the unnamed protagonist really have a mustache? (OK, that one is a bit practical, but bear with me.) If yes, what does it mean - in terms of character - that he shaved it? If not, then what fuels his obsession with the belief?Carrere takes the reader through an unsolvable quest of insecurities in The Mustache. The distinct, single-voice narrative - which is definitive of the author's voice in Class Trip as well - runs, simultaneously, through both the protagonist's and the reader's mind. One cannot disconnect from the voice.The narrative constitutes an integral part of Carrere's mission: to draw the reader in to the story. One has the opportunity to see all the wrong turns the protagonist takes, yet the reader is helpless in dissociating with the narrative. Hence, it is easy to sympathize with the protagonist, his search of peace of mind, his comfort in the repetitive, and his focus on the mundane - even if he does it just to get grounded.Class Trip presents much of the same dilemmas. Despite its publication nine years after The Mustache, the story carries and presents the same self-centered debates. Nicholas - a protected, shy middle-school student who still wets his bed, is enamored with his father, and has considerable paranoid tendencies - goes off to the ski school with all of his classmates.The plague sets in at the get go: his father refuses to let Nicholas ride in the school bus due to safety concerns; once Nicholas arrives at the chalet the father forgets to unload his bag; and the kid becomes the laughing stock of his class because someone refusing to lend him pajamas makes the comment that "he'll pee in them."Events lead Nicholas to form a bond with the class bully, Hodkann, and the charismatic instructor, Patrick. The latter accentuates Nicholas's hopes and bright side. Hodkann only contributes to Nicholas' insecurities and wish to prove himself, however. Nicholas' life at the chalet gets darker as events unfold, and he succeeds in daydreaming certain sequences that even a most paranoid person would have a hard time imagining.What is fascinating about Carrere's two novels is that despite the unforgiving self pity and pain the protagonists and readers endure - not to mention obvious salvations presented in both stories, which both the protagonists and reader avoid - and the parallel frustrations put forth (and lived through), the characters are very real. And they represent a part of everyone's dark, self-doubting, paranoid side.Note: If you have read either novel, or do end up reading them, and want to get into discussions as to WTF it all means, please leave a comment or email me. I am looking, desperately, for answers.

I found out about the death of my father in the middle of a syndicated triple-shot of Three’s Company.
As was usually the case on the late 1970s–early ’80s sitcom, Jack Tripper — played with aplomb by the physical comedic genius John Ritter — was in the middle of a misunderstanding; in this particular episode, it involved an older, attractive female cooking student and her rich husband. I didn’t get to see the resolution because mom walked through the door of the neighbors’ before the third act.
I was at the neighbors’ instead of home because my mother and sister had been at the hospital, where, hours before, dad was taken for a heart attack. Mom didn’t need to say a word when I anxiously asked after dad. She pursed her lips, furrowed her brow and lowered her head. I was not yet ten years old at the time but sophisticated enough to read her body language. Dad was dead.
I spent the next 20 minutes or so in an uncontrollable wail, much of which I don’t remember as I was blind and disoriented with tears and emotion. What I do remember is coming to on the green couch in front of the television set in the family living room. As I sniffled and cleared my bloodshot eyes, the first thing I saw was Jack Tripper — there he was again. He was trying to convince Mr. Roper that what looked like a near in flagrante moment with a woman was indeed not.
I’m not sure if a smirk was visible on my face, but I remember being entertained by the bit and, more important, comforted in the knowledge that the grief would have its moments of respite.
On the surface, the low culture of Three’s Company would appear to cheapen such a grave moment as the death of a father, but it’s what gave me the numbness to endure.
In The Things That Need Doing, a new memoir about a late-20-something dealing with the slow death of his beloved, hospital-ridden mother, Sean Manning finds similar distraction in the seemingly meaningless late-American din that surrounds us. After all, when going through something as serious and as soul-touching as the death of the woman that bore you, reading Marcel Proust — let alone Joan Didion’sThe Year of Magical Thinking— is just not going to happen.
In the book’s opening paragraph, Manning sets the tone when he’s reminded to wish his sick mother “happy birthday” not by the hospital clock striking midnight, but by the end credits of Home Improvement giving way to the opening theme song for The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. You can hear Will Smith’s syncopated nursery-rhyme rap in the background — West Philadelphia Born and Raised, On the playground is where I spent most of my days — as Manning leans in to whisper “happy birthday” into his mother’s ear.
What unfolds is a seemingly endless (more than a year) barrage of futile medical procedures battling the aftermath of a heart attack and a growing cancer in Manning’s mother. It’s an ugly existence peopled with arrogant doctors, bureaucratic health administrators and lame attempts at trying to hide hospital equipment (the constant reminders of failing health). Upon this plastic, unfeeling canvas, Manning manages to paint a moving portrait of a broken family becoming whole again as they put their respective lives on indefinite hold — come recovery or, as Manning has to increasingly accept, death.
But rather than tackle it head on — even his obsession with the details of his mother’s medical procedures seems like a method of dealing — Manning comes at it from the side, getting at the painful reality of the suffering through the soft lens of the television set in the background. To wit:
Seriously, how awful must it have been to be hospitalized before TV? ... I can’t even imagine how much more miserable those five nights to end February and begin March would’ve been without Nick at Nite. The bed fully upright. Flipping over her forehead washcloth after ten minutes and refreshing it every twenty. Her chin resting on the paper bucket, it trembling in her hands. The gagging and heaving coming every ten, fifteen minutes. The tube feed long shut off, nothing left but viscous green stomach acid that I’d wipe from her lips and chin with tissues. With another balled-up wad, wiping away her tears. And the whole time her eyes fixed on the one-hour, two-hour, sometimes all-night blocks of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and The Cosby Show, Home Improvement and Roseanne. The volume on the handset turned up as loud as it’d go.
Manning reveals how the small screen acts as a panacea, but more important, as a reminder of the world outside. Death and dying are big moments in life, moments that are near unbearable. It’s comforting to know that the world does and will keep revolving as we go through them. In modernity, sometimes it’s the dulcet tones of bad television that tell us so.
The odd byproduct is when these seemingly meaningless TV shows take on a Proustian quality. To this day, viewing a John Ritter pratfall brings me back to the day my father died, much like Will Smith in a flat-top haircut will surely do for Manning.

Who has baby fever? Belle Boggs does. Or rather, she did before she had her daughter. An attempt to understand this self-described “child-longing” during her trials with infertility treatments and her inability to conceive was one of the driving forces behind writing her book The Art of Waiting.
As Boggs writes, in Scandanavia this phenomena is known as “baby fever,” and has been studied by sociologist Anna Rotkirch, who believes this desire is not a social construction but rather the expression of an instinctual longing. Rotkirch conducted a study where she placed an ad in a paper that asked people to write in with their baby fever experiences. She was flooded with letters recounting dreams of babies every night, of the need to touch onesies, of the desire borne of holding a child, of the agony of not having one.
Not everyone has baby fever, thank goodness. I don’t have baby fever but I am prone to obsessive thinking and my curiosity about this specific obsession and the ways that I’m not in its thrall is part of what drew me to Boggs’s The Art of Waiting. Also, Boggs is a smart and attentive writer, and her book is championed by Eula Biss and Leslie Jamison -- two writers who’ve helped stake out a distinct corner in the medical humanities. The Art of Waiting promised to engage in a multifaceted dialogue, not just with Boggs’s experience with infertility treatments, but also with the broader cultural implications that lie at the intersection of child-longing and infertility and reproductive technologies, their benefits but also their detriment, and what this child-longing means for us as human animals and whether we have a choice in it.
The first half of the book delivers on this, for the most part. Boggs offers an engaging and empathetic description of her inability to conceive, the way she felt personal failure. Excluded from the natural rhythm of life, Boggs became even more keenly aware of mating among human and nonhuman animals, the ways that some species like marmosets depend on the suppression of reproductive capabilities because of limited resources within a community. She considers too mating in captivity, how at a North Carolina zoo, one female gorilla mates to conceive while another is given birth control as she’s groomed to take over in case the child is rejected.
Boggs considers the possibility of never having children, and briefly arrives at “the conscious possibility of a new purpose, a sense of self not tied to reproduction,” though with regard to the book, this is fleeting. She considers Virginia Woolf’s bareness and, as counterbalance, her creative output. Boggs writes too of the ways that her students become surrogate children -- and how they never ask why she doesn’t have biological children, because, she surmises, “they think they’re enough.”
But of course they aren’t. We know this as readers, and it’s easy to consider Boggs’s dilemma with compassion. But also, she might want to go one step further and ask, why isn’t it?
Boggs holds the reader close as she tells of her travails and heartache associated with her inability to conceive. She writes of watching Edward Albee’sWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with the high school English class she teaches. She points to the way that George kills the imaginary son in the last scene, and wonders if this killing was cruel or necessary. Boggs looks at this tendency toward surrogates among infertile couples, how Virginia Woolf wrote in her story “Lappin and Lappinova” of a marriage held together by a shared investment in their imaginary “private world, inhabited, save for the one white hare, entirely by rabbits.” Boggs too has a place within this lineage: she writes about how she and her husband unwittingly created an imaginary stuffed animal family when they first married, how they’d bring them out for holiday meals, but that later, after not being able to have children, this seemed more like a masquerade that embarrassed and pained her, and so she stuffed them in a basket with other bric-a-brac and shoved it all under the bed.
And sometimes Boggs’s imagination is too willing to shove ideas under the bed. She writes wistfully: “Nonhuman animals wait without impatience, without a deadline, and I think that is the secret to their composure.” This is an oversimplification of animal experience and it doesn’t interrogate or even attempt to consider the ways that other animal species might long to mother. Anna Rotkrich found -- as Boggs pointed out -- that a longing for children and to mother is instinctual. So why would Boggs assume another animal species would not feel this? Perhaps they’re at a loss to express it -- to her.
Boggs’s interpretation gestures toward other species but is inherently anthropocentric. She conjectures rather than wonders, and this shuts down the possibility of delving deeper, to interrogate, research, consider, and perhaps even attempt to find companionship, an alliance, or at least acknowledge the mothering and longing that any animal might feel.
Of course we all have limited life spans and periods of fertility, and while animals may not be aware of or able to communicate this longing and desire in human terms it doesn’t mean that they aren’t affected by a similar longing. When I was a child I was gifted with a book about Koko the gorilla who was taught human sign language as part of a graduate student’s experiment. Koko asked for a cat but was given a stuffed animal. She knew the difference and signed, “sad.” When she was given a kitten she mothered it as if it were a child. How is this not mothering? And why did Boggs, when writing and researching this book, not try harder to think about the experience of the nonhuman animal beyond her own anthropomorphic fantasy?
Boggs writes too with sympathy for the gorilla at the North Carolina zoo who’s forced to take birth control, but she also assumes that this gorilla doesn’t feel her longing: “To wait without knowing [one] is waiting.” Maybe not her longing, but how does she know what this gorilla thinks? Isn’t this pure conjecture?
Boggs looks to the nonhuman animal, to these gorillas, seemingly to expand the conversation about motherhood beyond species. But instead she uses them as a screen for her own longings. To speak of longing: what longing must salmon feel to swim upstream from their adult habitats back to their birthplaces so that they can spawn and, as a result of this journey, die? Perhaps if Boggs had encountered Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of umwelt she might have considered that the gorilla has a distinct sphere of existence, that its methods of communication and perception don’t necessarily translate to terms she can understand.
The onus was on Boggs to delve further, to have researched the ways these animals long or don’t long for motherhood. To consider what this child-longing might mean for nonhuman animals, what mothering means beyond one’s own progeny. Wouldn’t that have reinforced Anna Rotrich’s research that baby fever is instinctual? I can’t help but wonder, if this gorilla had been taught human sign language like Koko, would Boggs have been able to make the same proclamations? And if the answer is no, it seems that this is an inherent flaw.
But also, Boggs’s observation denies that many human animals do wait without impatience, that we don’t measure our personal success and failures by our reproductive capabilities, that perhaps we might recognize that a child could bring personal fulfillment, but that we don’t measure our worth by it.
Among those of us who aren’t natural caretakers, bringing a child into the world might signify an end as much as a beginning. I recently sat up late with friends, all of us in our late-30s or early-40s and childless and okay with it -- we realized how we would be obligated to care for a child. A child demands an investment in petty conversations at times. A child is always brilliant in its parents eyes. At least until it develops its own mind. It’s easy to talk about from the outside, I realize.
I see too how a child can be a source of fascination, of seeing anew. I have seen friends' lives replenished and nurtured, a newfound satisfaction with life brought on by the presence of their children. But what about the idea of not having children? What does this mean historically? Boggs talks about how in the period after WWII zero families thought it was ideal to have no children. That’s changed now, or common sense tells me this. But has it really? Despite waiting longer to have children, the number of women without children in their early-40s is falling. The Washington Post recently featured a profile of philosopher Travis Rieder who works at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and who published a book about the ethical imperative of limiting reproduction. We can limit our carbon footprint most significantly by choosing not to have children, and, with significant climate change and its consequences in our near future, Reider offers a radical suggestion for action to take now: “Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them.”
Reider himself has a child, and admits this was largely a concession because of his wife’s desire to have a child. But in The Art of Waiting, these types of ethical considerations are largely superficial or left untouched. The pressure to reproduce within families is one that we need to shift, Reider argues. And this isn’t entirely different from the “reproductive futurism” and the indisputable cult of the child that Lee Edelman described as a driving force of our heteronormative society in No Future. Edelman posits that the jouissance and non-reproductive sex associated with queerness is precisely what threatens the cult of the family, this continuous process of self-perpetuation. In the 12 years since Edelman’s book, perhaps tables have reversed, so that the idea of not reproducing is now a way too to perpetuate life.
But what I’m pointing to is that The Art of Waiting for all of its intelligence and care and research isn’t invested in considering the broader cultural and ethical contexts of assisted reproduction, of whether or not this desire to have children should be fulfilled. Or whether alternative forms of mothering when one can’t carry a child to term might not conform to Boggs's idea of mothering, but could be just as dynamic and fulfilling.
Of the privilege of having the choice and resources to choose IVF, Boggs discusses the financial investment, how costs can reach close to $100,000, and how some states have laws that mandate health insurance cover at least part of this. Boggs’s answer is that she largely supports making infertility treatments more accessible. Of course she does. But it’s also more complicated than she’s willing to grapple with.
It seems that an obstacle to Boggs’s consideration of motherhood, infertility, and medicine is that she did conceive. That her great longing was fulfilled. With the help of contemporary medicine she was able to bring a genetic child to gestation, a child that she carried within her womb. She had this child and perhaps it’s unconscionable for her to truly consider the alternative forms of mothering and meaning-making and mothering through care-taking, for children not her own genetic makeup, for other species even. She says that she and her husband consider adoption, but do they really? I don’t get the sense that this was a serious consideration -- adoption is someone else’s choice, but not Boggs’s, and despite being down on their luck, they were privileged, were able to invest in IVF and conceived a daughter during their first course.
Perhaps my expectations were set because of Biss’s endorsement. Her own book, On Immunity was also published by Graywolf. As someone who’s sat through an eight-hour class on vaccination and administration schedules and live versus dead vaccines, I can vouch that the straight science is rather tedious. But Biss stumbled into a rabbit hole when deciding whether or not to vaccinate her son and with which vaccines, and accompanying her as she finds her path through this is fascinating. Her son anchors the narrative, but provides more of a stepping off point to discuss the cultural history: the ways that milkmaids didn’t contract smallpox because of their exposure to the virus through a cow’s udders. About Daniel Defoe’sJournal of a Plague Year, Dracula’s need for blood as a critique of capitalism, and about how choosing not to vaccinate as a privileged, less-at risk family, isn’t ethical. That immunization is about the community, and as much as we’d like to think of our bodies as distinct islands, we’re truly interconnected.
While Biss states that the decision to vaccinate her son was an ethical decision, one that she felt she had to do despite its risks, Boggs also states that IVF was the best choice she and her husband ever made because they conceived their daughter. And while she may believe this personally, she says this without reflecting on its ethical underpinnings, like what this means for the habitability of our planet. Boggs talks about the ways infants vie for resources in the wild, but not the ways limited resources will play out for human and nonhuman animals in the near future. Many people are choosing not to have children for the good of the planet. Because of the carbon footprint. And to not consider this interconnection in this highly personal decision is an avoidance I can’t not think about, perhaps fixate on, in relation to this book and discussion.
Maybe it is enough for Boggs herself to “[tell] the stories that don’t get told, the ones some people don’t want to hear,” of what she and her husband learned before they had their daughter -- of the little known difficulties and travails of adoption, the infertility message boards and support groups, the way that passion and pleasure are replaced with clinical monitoring and pharmaceutical intervention and hormonal regulation associated with in vitro fertilization.
But The Art of Waiting isn’t memoir. It lacks the interrogation and consideration of what it truly means to mother beyond the heteronormative definitions of vaginal birth and sharing your offspring's DNA. Boggs looks to nonhuman animals for answers but lacks interspecies empathy, or openness to other possibilities -- perhaps because she doesn’t care to ask, perhaps because she now has a natural-born child, perhaps because it might cast the best decision that she’s ever made in a more muddled light? It’s obvious Boggs considers herself a success story. With patchwork she’s found a heteronormative solution, in fact, it seems that her answer is that she wishes similar luck for other who long for children. That they might not have to wait so long. This is unfortunately where the discussion rests.